


encore

by Azzandra



Series: it's the future, you see [2]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anevka 2.0, Canon-Typical Violence, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 10:56:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15580425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: It took dying for Anevka to learn what being a real person felt like.





	encore

"IV. The Journey. Upright meanings: transformation through complex processes; exploration of inner self; travel to new places in order to understand familiar notions.

Reversed meanings: perilous choices which yield insufficient rewards; dominance of superficial concerns; running away from difficult situations, repetition of negative patterns."

\--'The Abridged Guide to the Queen's Tarot Meanings' by Arabella Mignon (1986)

* * *

To Anevka, consciousness came like flipping a switch, which was a painfully adequate metaphor when considering her new situation. Since memory followed sluggishly behind, she had quite a few moments of staring down at her metal body and wondering if this was a very vivid, very strange dream. She considered pinching herself, but discarded the idea since she did not, at that moment, seem to be in possession of any flesh.

Next to her body, which was currently occupying a slab, she spotted a familiar shade of red hair, on a head bent low over her arm. More intellectually than viscerally, she felt a stab of alarm.

"Ow," Tarvek said, when she inadvertently electrocuted him. She knew it was her doing, because she saw the electricity arch from her fingertip into his hand as he was working on her wrist, and then he looked up to her face with mild alarm.

His chair screeched as he pushed it back, and he jumped to his feet. The sound was louder than anything else in the room, and so realistic in its normalcy, that Anevka felt unexpectedly grounded by it.

"You shouldn't be awake yet!" Tarvek said, and moved over her.

When his hand moved to touch her, possibly locate some off switch, Anevka caught it instead.

"Awake?" she said, voice pleasantly rendered by some device in her throat. "I believe what I shouldn't be, brother dear, is made of metal."

Her grip tightened on his hand. It possibly hurt--she felt enough strength in her new body to break his brittle little bones into many amusing pieces--but Tarvek didn't let it show. He held her gaze.

"What did you do?" she hissed. The possibilities flashed in her mind quickly; she had a vivid imagination for betrayal, when it came to her family. She'd not expected it from Tarvek, or at least not to this extent. But then, it wouldn't be betrayal if it wasn't from someone you trusted.

"I brought you back," Tarvek said calmly. "After what Father did to you. Do you remember?"

She took a moment to sort through her memories. Now that she actually focused on it, the information came easily. She recalled her own death with a dispassion that she assumed was artificially induced. Small mercies, since it was not the kind of thing she would have wanted to be consumed by at this moment. She might have broken poor Tarvek in her fit, poor vulnerable dear that he was.

"Well," she said, releasing him and patting his cheek, "why didn't you say so?"

"I just did," he rolled his eyes at her. "Now, do you want to go back offline while I adjust your fine motor control, or do you want to be awake for it?"

"Oh, I could do with some entertainment," Anevka said airily.

"It's not remotely entertaining. It's pure tedium," Tarvek pointed out. "It's why you were supposed to be offline for it."

"Nonetheless, do indulge me," she said, and smiled at him.

Her face did not feel the same, and controlling it did not feel like commanding muscles. But she was sure she managed to make that smile appear just as it would have in life.

* * *

Tarvek continued his work, and though she watched him like a hawk so she would know exactly what he was doing, she was almost disappointed to discover that he'd been entirely forthright in his claim that he was working on her fine motor control. It was all precisely as tedious as he indicated, but she would not relent now and let herself be turned off.

She had time to observe. The last time she had seen her brother, he had been just barely emerging from boyhood, and eager to escape to Paris for his student years. She'd been envious of his good luck at the time, and now thought herself quite justified in it, considering what had happened to her since.

Now, though... He was an adult proper. He'd lost the last of his baby-fat, gotten a pair of glasses that flattered his face more--how unnecessary that he'd been hiding his best features behind those clunky frames!--and there was also some ineffable quality to his new demeanor that brought his entire countenance together. Self-assurance, perhaps? He'd certainly had room to blossom once the weight of their father's attention was taken off of him.

He offered to fill her in on the intervening years, and she accepted. She was quite glad to be sitting down--or, lying down, rather--once he got to the more incredible parts of the story. It wasn't so much the parts with the time stop, and the Empire collapsing, and the travels across Europa that amazed her, but that he was the Heterodyne's consort! The genuine article, honest to goodness Heterodyne Girl, and he'd weaseled himself into her good graces!

Well. Once she had that fine motor control, she was sure to give him a round of applause for managing that one.

* * *

Once Tarvek was done working on her, he turned off all the equipment and returned full control of her body to her.

It was very strange, to suddenly be aware of her limbs in a way that she hadn't been of her flesh and bones. The human brain had unconscious control of the body's processes, but the clank brain apparently had awareness of a great deal more operations than that.

She mentioned this out loud to Tarvek, and he frowned in thought.

"I hadn't considered that aspect," he admitted. "The first version of your body didn't operate autonomously from the beginning. You're being thrown at the deep end, so to speak. You should have more than enough processing power to handle it, though."

"Oh, it certainly feels like I do!" Anevka said, flexing her fingers. She could feel every operation that went into that motion. "Nothing feels difficult, it's only a bit odd."

"That's good," Tarvek said, relieved.

"Later, however, we will have to talk about that first version," Anevka continued, pinning him with a look that could once send servants crying out of the room.

He winced, but did not shrink under her gaze. He only nodded, resigned to it. Oh, shoot, she'd have to practice that look with her new face. It had apparently lost something in translation.

She hopped down from the slab and took a slow circuit of the room, adjusting to the strangeness of her new sensations. She felt, rather confusingly for her lack of muscles, strong and healthy. In top form, for all that she was mostly metal and ceramic plating. 

Tarvek hovered nearby as she walked, no doubt ready to catch her should she take a dramatic swoon, but she felt fine. She took a critical look at her surroundings, while she was up and about.

"Tarvek, dear, not to criticize, but unless you have taken some truly outré decorating decisions while I was gone, I do believe we are not in Sturmhalten anymore," she remarked as Tarvek worked.

Most of the laboratories at Sturmhalten did not have quite so many safety hazards. Or grinning skulls adorning the walls. 

"You are correct!" a voice grinded from the walls around them. 

"We are in Castle Heterodyne," Tarvek said.

"I can introduce myself," the Castle said huffily, then, more dramatically, "I am Castle Heterodyne!"

"Yes, he said," Anevka replied, amused. 

Clothing had been prepared for her, as well as a wig. And while she did not resolve to trust her brother about everything he told her without some amount of independent verification on her own part, she would never doubt his sense of taste.

Since she was missing quite a few years in between her existence in the flesh and her new circumstances, she took a moment to analyze the prepared outfit and extrapolate any new fashion trends from it. The cut on the suit pants was wider and looser than she remembered had been fashionable, and the vest was asymmetrical, buttoning up along the left side. But the red wig, and the deep gold and maroon of the outfit, were both shades she would have worn once.

Once she was put together, in more ways than one, she felt prepared to face the world.

"Where shall we head to?" she asked Tarvek.

Castle Heterodyne replied before he could, "My mistress would be glad if you joined her for breakfast."

"Oh, goodness, is it morning right now?" Anevka asked, before turning to Tarvek. "Have you been working through the night on my body? How precious!" She smooshed his cheeks with her palms. "You always were such a sentimental little boy!"

"A-nev-ka!" he growled, exasperated to be treated like he was still twelve. He tried to roll his eyes, but really, he'd always been such a soft spot for any show of affection. Almost funny, really. She very much could imagine how the Lady Heterodyne had him wrapped around her finger. She'd have to keep an eye out for that.

"Let us away," Anevka declared, releasing Tarvek and smoothly spinning on her heel. She headed for the nearest door. "Evidently I have no need for food anymore, but I do suffer for some good conversation!"

"We've been talking all night," Tarvek pointed out.

"So you see," Anevka clenched her chest, giving the ceiling a piteous glance like she was asking Castle Heterodyne to witness her suffering, "that I am positively starved for pleasant company!"

"Oh, I like her!" Castle Heterodyne said, and then its stones ground together in what sounded like its approximation of a chuckle.

Anevka was going to have a great deal of fun meeting the in-laws.

* * *

Making sense of this new world that Anevka had been thrust into had the slightly surreal quality that she would expect of trying to navigate the afterlife. How her brother had fallen in with the Heterodyne Girl and the Baron's son was a story unto itself.

However, information was easy enough to collect, now that she also had the benefit of perfect recall. She was careful in her inquiries and played off her curiosity as lightly as she could, and things more or less added up. She truly had woken up to a world far stranger than the one she'd departed.

Mechanicsburg--and Castle Heterodyne by extension--was very welcoming towards her. Displaced from her body as she was, still nobody found her strange or acted as though she were an awkward addition to their panoply of eccentricities. The Fifty Families would no doubt have a fit, and she wrote off as a loss all of her high society acquaintances and quite a chunk of her family, but on her brother's word, everyone in the strange town took it as given that she was Princess Anevka Sturmvoraus, and acted as though that was a self-evident truth. The Jägers, in particular, were outrageous in their flirtation, though perhaps it was the fact that Anevka was used to more subtle wordplays and overtures, whereas the closest the Jägers got to subtle was wording their innuendos as puns. 

What she found herself doing, once she got her bearings, was observing Wulfenbach and the Heterodyne. They were open in their affections with her brother, almost disgustingly so, but Anevka had been raised to look for the cracks in every mask. The benefits of this triadic leadership of the Empire were self-evident in what each party brought to the table. The Heterodyne Peace, the Wulfenbach Order and... the Valois Legacy.

But they had not made him Storm King, Anevka couldn't help but notice. They had broken the crown up between the three of them, rather than let Tarvek have it. Rather than let any Valois have it, Anevka suspected, but Tarvek having the strongest claim meant that really, he had been the one cheated out of it.

It would have been easier for Anevka if she could pinpoint the pretense for Tarvek, but she was beginning to despair of the fact that there was genuine love in this relationship, and that Tarvek had settled for that instead of the throne he was entitled to.

It was maddening and inexplicable, and yet something always stopped her from outright taking him by the shoulders, and shaking him, and asking why he wasn't Storm King yet. It was in all the small gestures that Anevka caught glimpse of between the three lovers; the distracted kisses, the pages they'd bookmark for one another; the experiments they excitedly talked about.

Sometimes just watching them exist in a room was a chore for her. She found herself invited to the breakfast table even though she did not eat, and she kept returning out of a morbid fascination. She often sat with a magazine open before her, under the guise of catching up with fashion and gossip, though really she was committing to memory every conversation on Empire business that took place across the overladen breakfast table. Tarvek likely knew what she was doing, but allowed it. The Heterodyne didn't care. And Wulfenbach was too flustered by her to really object.

She paid attention to their easy conversations, to their banter and playful arguments, and to the small smile that Tarvek had; not even really obvious on his face, and if anyone else looked, they likely wouldn't interpret that expression as a smile at all. But Anevka knew, this was how Tarvek knew when he was happy.

It was so trite! Happiness, for all their family had planned, and prepared, and endured? Love, instead of a crown? 

It was for the first time in her life that Anevka found her brother alien to her, committed to choices that she could not comprehend.

* * *

Castle Heterodyne had any number of amusements, even for a clank which did not sleep, and though Anevka gravitated towards the library, and then the labs, she would on occasion wander its halls to see what she might discover by herself. The Castle was most helpful as a tour guide, always having a plethora of historical information and amusing anecdotes about Heterodynes past to dispense, but it also insisted on making her jump through hoops to find out anything. And the hoops, in this scenario, were its death traps.

"I must commend your brother on this body," the Castle chortled, as Anevka hung by her fingertips from a giant swinging axe, "it is quite nimble."

"Oh, it's not who builds it, it's who drives," Anevka replied matter-of-factly as she hoisted herself up onto the flat of the axe, and then hopped onto the next one. She had to; the floor was literally lava. She really shouldn't have said all those things about the Castle's traps being played out, because now it was trying to be creative.

"Indeed," the Castle rumbled, distinctly amused. 

She ought to have been annoyed, but really, she enjoyed these opportunities to test the limits of her new body. It was strong, and fast, and her reaction time had been calibrated to match, but she had to get used to it, and shed herself of her old human rhythms and perceived limitations.

When her feet finally hit solid floor, on the other side of the obstacle, she almost expected there to be a kind of reward at the end. Maybe one of the more amusing torture chambers. She'd had quite a laugh in Tympanus' Music Room last time she'd navigated one of the Castle's death trap obstacle courses.

But no, she'd rather boringly landed in a hallway she recognized, near the library.

"Was I not heading in the opposite direction?" Anevka asked, crossing her arms and tapping her foot as she looked at the ceiling.

"You were! But there's somebody who wants to meet you waiting in the library."

Anevka frowned, trying to think who the Castle might be referring to, but it could have been anyone. She couldn't put it past the creepy old stack of bricks to have a very nasty surprise in store for her. Still, it did not do to flinch. The way one dealt with Castle Heterodyne, Anevka suspected, was to never back down. She walked up to the familiar library door, and did not linger in the threshold before stepping through.

At first, she did not think there was anyone at all there. As pranks went, this was one of the Castle's more anodyne ones. But after surveying the room, she noticed there was a new piece of furniture that had not been there before. 

She walked up and rounded the armchair, and found herself greeted by the even stare of Moxana, Muse of Mysteries.

"You're the one who wanted to meet me?" Anevka asked, incredulous. Then she eyed the ceiling suspiciously. "And how, pray tell, did she request this meeting?"

"She has ways," the Castle replied, affecting an aura of mystery that did not suit it at all.

"Don't we all," Anevka deadpanned, before returning her attention to Moxana. She found herself being regarded serenely back by the Muse; her elbows were on the table, and her chin was resting on her loosely laces fingers, like a picture of patient attentiveness.

Anevka found it a bit eerie, if she were strictly honest. Like staring in a carnival mirror of herself. Mouthless, unfathomable, unreadable, never human to begin with. Design-wise, they were starting from different points and landing somewhere near the same middle ground. Did they have the same eyes, Anevka wondered? Was this what it was like when people looked at her? 'Surely I'm not as tacky a dresser, at least,' Anevka told herself.

"Fine," Anevka said, shaking off that train of thought. She pulled a chair up to Moxana's table, and sat in it, primly. "What do you have for me, Muse of Mystery? I do hope it's worth the trip I had to make across lava to be here."

The tabletop flipped rapidly, and a tarot deck was produced. 'Oh, of course', Anevka thought, as Moxana's fingers worked rapidly, and three cards were placed face-down.

"Past, present, future?" Anevka asked, and Moxana inclined her head just so. "How exciting. I've never had anyone tell my fortune before. Let's hear it, then!"

The first card was flipped, the one corresponding to the past. Anevka recognized the deck as the Queen's Tarot, which was good since it seemed she was going to have to provide her own interpretation. If this were a real fortune teller, she'd have requested a refund at this point.

The card pictured a stylized machine, crossed by a red bolt and smoking off the top, and a figure kneeling next to it in a despondent pose. Anevka picked it up, making a show of considering it.

"The Saboteur. How appropriate! Let me see if I recall the meaning. 'Others mean you harm', or 'stagnation because of outside circumstances', or 'lack of control over your own destiny'." Anevka flicked the card back to the table, where it landed with a flutter. 

Viscerally, what she'd wanted to do was respond with two very short and vulgar words. What she did instead, out of manners that were ingrained so deeply they'd become survival instinct along the way, was smile. It was always better to smile.

"That one was terribly obvious, my dear. I do hope your little parlor trick gets better."

Moxana gestured to the middle card, and tilted her head in a question.

The past had been a freebie. Anyone could have gotten that card right, after knowing Anevka's story. 

But even Anevka didn't know what to make of the present. She didn't know if she wanted to make sense of it through the lens of a tarot card, even if the nature of this deck made it... something more than just a parlor trick. 

Moxana did not seem inclined to rush Anevka. She waited, impassive and patient, as Anevka worked through her indecision.

"Let's see it, then," Anevka said.

Moxana lowered her head in acknowledgment, and flipped the card over.

The Scholar, reversed.

Usually The Scholar was a good card to see. It meant, 'enlightenment is within reach', or 'finding inspiration from an unexpected source', or 'patience begets understanding'.

But reversed it was--

"'Knowledge without understanding', or 'learn by doing', or 'isolation breeds madness'." Anevka's first impulse was to reach out, and take the card, and rip it to shreds. It deserved no less for telling her such things.

Instead, she smiled, and flipped her hair as if she hadn't a care in the world.

"Honestly, dear, don't you think that's a bit rude?" Anevka asked. "You make me sound like some dismal little madgirl headed for doom. I almost can't imagine what you have in store for me on the third card, if this is how the first two went."

Moxana turned her palms upwards as if in a shrug, and then put her hands down next to the final card, tapping it with a finger. She raised an eyebrow at Anevka, and gestured to the card in invitation.

"Yes, alright," Anevka said, taking this to mean that Moxana wanted her to turn the card herself.

She reached for the card, but before she could so much as brush her fingers against it, Moxana moved with lightning speed, and snatched it. Just as quickly, in a single fluid motion, she slipped the card back into the deck and shuffled it, all while Anevka stood with her hand still outstretched, and completely agape.

A cold rage hummed in the back of Anevka's head, like distant thunder warning of coming destruction. It wasn't even Moxana that she was angry at, not really. It was everyone else who had come before her, and snatched salvation from under Anevka's fingertips. Now she had nothing to lose by giving in to that rage, yet still it remained something dampened and apart from herself.

Moxana fanned out the cards in an arc before her, face-up. They were all blank.

This was so unexpected that Anevka found herself blinking and leaning back. They'd transitioned to magic tricks, now?

With her clever fingers, Moxana pushed up the cards from one side, so they flipped over in a wave all the way to the other end, and now they were fanned in the same arc, but only showing their backs. 

And then she did it in reverse, and the cards were once again face up, no longer blank.

Anevka had never had her fortune told with tarot before, but she was quite certain this was not how it usually went.

"The future is not yet decided?" she guessed at the interpretation.

Moxana steepled her fingers, silent and watching in response.

"It's... up to me?" Anevka guessed again, with a twinge of annoyance. Making a clank without a mouth, what a ridiculous idea. Anevka scoffed and leaned back, arms crossed. "Well, what do you want me to do about it?"

Moxana selected a card from the deck, and held it up.

The Journey.

Anevka knew the meaning of that one as well, though she got the distinct feeling Moxana meant it more literally than that.

"I don't suppose you have a card that tells me where I should go, as well?" Anevka asked.

In response, Moxana's tabletop flipped over, and the tarot deck was gone from sight.

"No, I didn't suppose you had," Anevka mused.

* * *

Tarvek was not surprised to hear she was leaving Mechanicsburg. He seemed quite aware that the town was something of an acquired taste, and he had perhaps grown fond of it more on account of the Heterodyne Girl, than any inherent virtue on Mechanicsburg's part. No, virtue was certainly not the word for this place. So he didn't try to stop her from leaving. But he suddenly became anxious when she said she had no idea where she would go or what she would do.

"If you require maintenance," he began.

"Then I've seen you do it, and I can handle it just fine," Anevka replied, as she sorted through her wigs, deciding which to take. She had a paltry collection so far. She'd have to reuse some with different outfits. How bourgeois.

"For anything more substantive, I would insist you contact me," he said, as he paced her room.

Anevka rolled her eyes.

"I'll hardly let your work fall into the hands of any uppity student Spark in Europa," she said. 

"Anevka," Tarvek groaned, taking his glasses off and rubbing the bridge of his nose. "There's no back-up. I put everything into building this body for you, and transferring your consciousness into it. You are the unique outcome to years of work, and I don't think even I could replicate it if I had to. I don't... want anything to happen to you."

"Your crowning achievement, am I?" Anevka chortled in response, and he--almost--flinched. She must have revealed more than she meant to by those words, but it would do him good to know what she thought.

He walked up to her, jaw set, and took her hands.

"Yes, you are," he said stubbornly. He reached into his coat, and took out a notebook from an inner pocket. It was battered, and overstuffed with loose papers, and held together with a band. "Just in case anything happens to you and I can't be there to help, I want you to take this."

He handed her the notebook, which was encrypted, of course, but Anevka knew just by the sketches that these were the notes on her body's creation.

Anevka felt a pang of... something. It was the greatest advantage Tarvek had, to be the only one able to fully understand this body, and here the silly boy was just handing this to her, as if he, oh dear, trusted her implicitly. What had happened to him while she'd been away?

She laughed, trying to play it off, trying to say something teasing, but she held the notebook tightly to her chest as she did so, and did not quite know how to process the encounter even after Tarvek left the room.

* * *

Anevka left Mechanicsburg with only the vaguest plans to speak of, but it was not as though she needed to plan all that carefully to begin with. Given the generous stipend Tarvek had secured for her, the papers that allowed free passage across the Empire and beyond, and the Sturmvoraus name, Europa was open to her in all its delights.

She'd never thought to have free rein to go anywhere she wanted before, and so she had never thought what to do once she had. The freedom was intoxicating.

So first thing, she did not go to Sturmhalten.

She would never go to Sturmhalten ever again if she could help it.

She took a Corbettite train to Bucharest, where it was spring, and all the trees were in bloom, and she attended every theater and opera performance she could squeeze in. It helped that she did not sleep, because she managed to get herself invited to all the afterparties.

Annoyed that she could not consume any of the beverages, she concocted a sort of drink of her own, out of things no human might plausibly drink. She may have caused a tiny explosion in the process, which had her banned from the Romanian Atheneum, but by that point she rather thought Bucharest was played out.

She shopped a great deal, and filled up her hotel suite with new dresses and suits and wigs and accessories of every stripe, and then she had everything she didn't particularly care for sent to Mechanicsburg. Everything else, she packed onto a rented private airship, and she was off again.

The captain of the airship was an accommodating young woman, possessing the steely calm that one required in order to manage a crew of airmen on one hand and the egos of her usual clientele on the other. She did not blink at being hired by a clockwork princess with an excess of luggage, and Anevka decided she was going to keep Captain Bogunović around for as long as she was going to be amusing.

* * *

The ship had a stop in Ada Kaleh for a refuel and some resupplying. Anevka had rushed them out of Bucharest a bit quickly, so she was hardly opposed, but as long as the ship was docked there, she decided to have a walk around.

For all that she had been warned it was a bit of a smuggler's nest, Anevka didn't see anything too alarming. It was a tiny island on the Danube, largely inconsequential, and overlooked so consistently that no war had ever come to disrupt the lives of its residents. It was provincial, but in a charming way. 

Houses had no fences or hidden courtyards. Long tables were set out along the streets, in the shade of tall trees or under colorful striped awnings. The shops and vendors had wares on display, but nobody was hawking or trying to harass her into buying anything. Women wore intricate jewelry, and men wore bright red fezzes, and for all that they were simple people at a first glance, they had a strange self-satisfaction about them, and regarded Anevka with calm, unconcerned eyes, as if she were no more curious than anyone else who docked on their forgotten little spit of land. 

The entire town was on a different rhythm here. After the glitz of the theater, and the flash of high society, this place was strangely down to earth, and stripped of pretense.

On that late spring day, bright and beautiful and so hushed after the din of the big city, with the call to prayer resonating somewhere in the distance and washing over the sleepy town, Anevka found herself inexplicably spooked.

It was quiet enough to think here, and she did not like it. She did not need it.

She went back to the airship, filled up on her clank-grade vodka substitute, and spent the rest of the stop drunk out of her gourd.

* * *

In Budapest, she met Persida and Zephmyr for the first time, when they were in the process of grifting the local clergy out of a large lump sum and the bones of an old saint (likely fake, but certainly a collector's item.) 

They were both constructs, though well-made enough to fool laymen. They passed themselves as denizens of the Deep Realms instead, and affected an eccentric enough manner to be believable as such.

Anevka saw through them, of course. By schmoozing a local councilman, she ended up invited to all the same parties as Persida and Zephmyr, and after a while, the three of them ended up making small talk and exchanging little tidbits of delicious gossip about the locals.

Zephmyr was some sort of bat construct, covered by fuzzy black fur and with his upturned nose almost endearingly ugly. When he smiled, he showed fangs, but he did not smile in his role as the mysterious priest of a lost underground civilization. He wore dark robes with deep hoods and spoke in a booming voice, and few people seemed willing to question his legitimacy.

Persida took a different tack, more in the vein of impressive décolletage and an aura of exoticism. She was some sort of bat construct as well, though her creator had apparently taken great care to sculpt her face into something more appealing to Europan standards of beauty. When she smiled, however--and she certainly smiled more often than Zephmyr--she flashed her own set of fangs. Her hair was the same fuzzy pelt as Zephmyr, but more brown than black. It made her appear softer, and more approachable, and Anevka appreciated that particular misdirection for how masterful it was; Persida was doubtless the more dangerous of the two.

Anevka couldn't help but try everything she could to uncover their ploy.

"So tell me, darling," Persida asked conversationally, as she hung from the window of a church spire holding a bag of holy bones, "are you going to turn us in now?"

"Oh, certainly not," Anevka replied, as she stood on the nearest roof, with a death ray aimed at Zephmyr's head. "Why would I, when things are just getting interesting?"

She made them return the bones, of course. People could get so touchy when their holy relics were involved, and Persida and Zephmyr hardly needed that kind of trouble. But she let them keep the money; the priests had handed it over fair and square. Persida and Zephmyr left Budapest post-haste, and the clergy was none the wiser to the fact they'd been scammed out of considerable sums. 

Anevka wasn't going to tell them, of course. They had eyes that stared right through her at times, and she could see it written under their fake smiles that they did not believe her to have a soul. She smiled back, just as fake, even though she had her own doubts about herself. She did not believe there was anything worthwhile in these priests either, but that was what one did at parties.

Anevka hung around Budapest for a while longer, but nothing really held her attention there anymore, so come the end of summer, she left again.

* * *

In Zagreb, she accidentally joined up with a heroic posse and possibly saved the city from an invasion of giant sentient crickets. Oops.

Though she was loathe to admit that was her fault at all. It would have been a pity to waste all that strength in her body when there were so many overgrown insects to punch, and she found all that punching a bit therapeutic. She could understand a bit of why someone might take this kind of thing on as a profession. 

She did not even realize just how grateful people tended to be about that sort of thing until she saved Captain Bogunović from getting her arm chewed off by a locust legionnaire, and the good Captain proceeded to kiss Anevka fully on the mouth. Not that Anevka minded anything but the timing on that; there were quite a few other insectile warriors closing in on them at that very moment.

When the heroes came along, in a haphazard group, breathless with fighting, and with Spark madness lighting their eyes, Anevka fell in with them without really thinking it through. 

She helped them set up a trap for the Army of the Cricketmen, as one did when in Zagreb, apparently. Later she would claim she'd merely been caught in the fugue, and let herself be carried away with it. 

But afterwards, as she sat in her cabin on Captain Bogunović's airship, with Tarvek's notes open on her knees as she repaired some minor damage to her hand, she considered whether there might be some pesky altruism at play here. She resolved to drink herself silly to forget, but was distracted by the plan when Captain Bogunović knocked on her door.

"You can call me Danica," the Captain said as a blush spread across her face. It made her look pretty, in a cute peasant girl sort of way, so Anevka smiled in response, and decided she would very much like to call the Captain Danica.

 

* * *

In Prague, she met Persida and Zephmyr again. 

A miserable, numbing winter was underway at the time. It was so cold, that it didn't even snow. Instead the city was overcast and gray, and its trees black and leafless.

Anevka was just visiting the intricately beautiful library at Klementinum. In the paper quietude of the library, elegant, many-armed clanks worked to re-shelve books in graceful choreography, and Anevka found herself following to watch them. She found herself watching clanks more closely as of late, perhaps because vanity motivated her to measure herself against them and find herself superior.

But that was when she spotted them. Persida and Zephmyr were each clad in thick, moth-eaten wool, and they had their heads together over a book.

They clashed terribly with the baroque perfection of the Klementinum, and Anevka approached them if only to find out what scam they were running this time. They recognized her immediately, and she didn't know who looked stranger with that startled realization across their face.

"Let me buy you some coffee," Anevka offered, and the two shared a glance before accepting.

Finding a fashionable little cafe nearby was no issue, though Anevka found herself having to slip a wad of banknotes to the owner before the man would stop being unfathomably rude about constructs in his establishment. He begrudgingly served Persida and Zephmyr coffee, and the two accepted with some awkwardness.

But Anevka brushed all of that aside, because she was curious about what her Budapest acquaintances were up to.

She got explanations out of them in halting pieces. They were no longer passing themselves as coming from the underground. Instead, they'd fallen in with a band of student anarchists, and wore their construct origins openly. They'd run out of the money they made in Budapest, and now they lived in a student dormitory's attic, and they audited classes at the University of Prague.

Anevka tried a dozen different ways to get the full story out of them, before they finally grew annoyed and she realized that they were truly not attempting to con anyone out of anything, save perhaps the University out of an education. Suddenly, their moth-eaten piles of scarves had lost some of their Bohemian charm, and an ugly, unpalatable reality intruded on the conversation.

"The Empire has plenty of jobs for constructs," Anevka said, thinking it was the kind thing to offer under the circumstances.

"The Empire has plenty of jobs for criminals, too," Persida replied with heat. "No, thanks. We'll take our chances here."

Anevka didn't understand, but she sensed that any attempt on her part to help or put in a good word would be construed poorly. She smiled at them instead, to show there were no hard feelings, and she did not offer anything more but to pay for their coffee at the end.

As he got up, Zephmyr passed Anevka a grease-stained pamphlet. He was wordless, his black-on-black eyes unreadable, but he seemed sad. He'd been coughing intermittently as he let Persida carry the conversation.

Anevka walked them out of the cafe, then watched them disappear into the streets of Prague, swallowed by the crowd. Zephmyr's coughs were too weak to even carry over the murmur of traffic.

She looked at the pamphlet after they were gone, and learned that it was a call for a meeting on construct rights. It had been printed on cheap paper, and the ink ran. There was a fierce little doodle of a patchwork raising a wrench in the air, looking heroically defiant. It struck Anevka as nothing more than fanciful, but despite her initial impulse to crumple up the pamphlet and discard it, she instead smoothed it out and slipped it into her coat pocket.

Anevka did not see Persida or Zephmyr at the Klementinum again, though she went there daily. The rest of the winter proceeded to be cold, and miserable, and stubbornly devoid of snow.

* * *

Before the winter was out, Anevka began experimenting with her maintenance regime, to better ward against the cold and humidity of the city. Tarvek's notes were still invaluable, but so were Danica's warm hands when Anevka couldn't reach a spot.

Danica was not a Spark, but as a minion she was quite up to snuff. She'd grown up on airships, and learned how to hold a screwdriver right, and she was a good distraction from the increasing tensions in the city.

"Three more constructs picked up at the airship docks," Danica reported as she tightened the delicate screws along Anevka's back plates. Her hands were thick, but graceful, and she was unbearably delicate at this task. Anevka found herself endeared to the captain with every such maintenance session.

"Stirring up trouble again?" Anevka asked, propping her chin on her fist as she stared out the cabin porthole. She saw only a stretch of gray sky, unchanged in all her time in Prague.

"They're talking about a strike, now," Danica continued. "Rumors of protests in the city."

Strikes and protests. That was all they ever talked about in worried whispers in this city anymore. Anevka found it dreary, and not for the first time, she told herself she should leave. Not for the first time, she then asked herself what kept her there anyway.

No heroics this time, she told herself. No heroics ever. Perhaps it was the Klementinus that made staying worth it. She had not had time to explore the whole thing.

"Some of the student anarchists are going to protest in solidarity, if the constructs go through with it," Danica remarked at the end.

Anevka found that it ruined her mood. How was she going to enjoy Danica's capable hands with all these disturbing thoughts her words induced?

"Of course they will," Anevka said sourly. "They're students, they'll look for any opportunity to smash a few storefronts."

Then she turned around, and one of her hands slipped up along the back of Danica's neck, and Anevka pulled her into a kiss to shut her mouth.

* * *

What did keep Anevka in Prague? The frigid winter turned to just as frigid spring. The skies cleared to a luminous blue, but breath still turned to fog on the air.

Spring brought the promised strikes and protests. The constructs of Prague were the ones who kept the city running, and the baseline humans were just noticing this fact now that they had stopped doing so. The dockworkers were the first to stop work, and air trade ground down to a snail's pace. The manufacturers, the sewer workers, the crypt-keepers, the cleaners, the repairmen, constructs stuck doing only the most base jobs, slowly joined the strike.

Anevka could feel the tensions on her own skin. The hostility which bubbled over with every day that the city was in disarray sometimes found her even past her expensive clothing and elevated station. Before, she might have been a Princess, a curiosity, a miracle of science, but all compliments to Tarvek's work were indulgences that she had been allowed. Now tolerance strained so much that even Anevka felt the consequences.

It might have been easy to blame the constructs for it. But Anevka found herself weary of parties where she had to bring her own drinks and tolerate condescending smiles and prying questions. For once, she found herself petty enough to be glad for any inconvenience the city suffered. For once, she found herself glad to not be invited to any of the parties, and she was only too glad to glare down any proprietors who did not like seeing her entering their places of business.

More pamphlets were slipped into her hands: cheap paper and running ink, declaring for construct rights, organizing protests. She discarded them all, even though she kept Zephmyr's pamphlet safe between the pages of her notebook on the airship. She neither knew why she kept that one, nor why she discarded all others, only that she had no interest in joining the rabble in their noise-making.

When violence finally broke across the city, it was three days of lightning. The Prague Police came at the protesters and strikers with electric disruptors, and scrambled the brains of any constructs they encountered with great impunity.

Anevka was on the airship when it happened, and Danica forbade her from leaving. The sweet girl couldn't have stopped Anevka if the latter truly wanted to leave, but she found no such desire in herself. She stood on the deck, watching the play of light across the night sky as electric discharges went off across the city.

* * *

In rapid succession, Anevka received and discarded ten panicked telegrams from Tarvek. She was infinitely amused when an Empire questor showed up at the airship, and she took great joy in teasing the man until he left. He'd only been there to ensure she was unharmed, after all, and once he knew he was free to return to Tarvek with the news, like a loyal hound.

Danica had wanted to leave when the unrest first started, but Anevka refused. It was only a week later that Anevka even understood herself why she did.

The streets were quiet in the aftermath of violence. Anevka walked the streets without any fear, even for the black patches of electric damage she would occasionally pass. Where before the looks she received would be hostile, now she was met with flinches and averted eyes. The violence had been more than anyone there had bargained for, and so explicit in its cruelty that the people whose moods had caused it now felt the weight of moral consequence. It was a weakness they should have purged before turning murderous devices on sentient creatures, but that was their lesson to learn, and Anevka scarcely cared.

There were no pamphlets anymore, save those trampled underfoot and swept up by quiet cleaners. But Anevka had questions, and a face that got answers from the specific type of person she asked them of. She was no Princess in the world of the constructs who lived their marginal little lives in Prague, doing the city's dirty work. But she was just enough of an abomination that they accepted a sort of kinship with her. It served.

When she found Persida, it was in a filthy hostel, which had been turned into temporary field hospital. Persida was not injured, but she donned a butcher's apron, the closest thing to a nurse's coat that the hostel could procure, and she attended to catatonic patchworks on rows of dirty beds.

She nearly dropped the basin of water she'd been holding when she saw Anevka, and with just a few words exchanged, they were soon crowded inside a closet, elbowing their way among cleaning supplies and mops for privacy.

"What are you doing here?" Persida asked, low and pained.

"I was looking for you and Zephmyr," Anevka replied, speaking to the obvious.

"Zephmyr's dead," Persida said bluntly.

Anevka found herself blinking in response. Her first thought was of the dry cough that Zephmyr had had the last time she'd seen him, and shamefully she remembered second the violence in the city, which provided a more immediate explanation for his fate.

It was sad, in an abstract sense that all death was sad. By Persida's expression, Anevka guessed there was no dedicated, guilt-ridden sibling to bring Zephmyr back as one had done for Anevka. 

"I'm sorry," Anevka said, reaching out a hand, wanting to touch Persida's blood-stained sleeve for comfort.

Persida slapped the hand away, a flash of anger in her black-on-black eyes.

"You're not!" Persida hissed. "You don't care! Not about Zephmyr, not about anyone! You've never had to mourn for anyone, so don't pretend now!"

Anevka felt as though the floor fell out from under her. 

It was shock, Anevka thought, self-diagnosing even as the rest of her locked up. Nobody had ever said something like this to her before. Not even Tarvek had dared. 'Knowledge without understanding' rang through her head nonsensically. Then, 'isolation breeds madness.'

She had never mourned, and Persida was right, she was not truly sorry. She had no idea what that would even feel like. Her emotions ticked along at even-keel, never truly sinking to the depths of suffering that she saw now in Persida's face.

She'd forgotten. Anevka had done so much smiling, that she'd forgotten. Her face used to hurt, when she'd been flesh and blood. She would smile for so long, that her muscles grew fatigued and ached. But it no longer hurt to smile now, and her mechanized face could lock into her old smile without any of the pain that reminded her she was meant to be suffering. 

"You're right," Anevka said with detachment, and left.

She spoke not a word until she was back at the airship, and then only to give Captain Bogunović their next destination.

* * *

She did not even know Tarvek was in Sturmhalten until he walked into the lab and found her with cables cascading from her head.

"What are you doing?" he asked in Spark-crackle voice as he crossed the lab towards her.

"Stop!" she said in the same mad voice, and he came to a halt suddenly, his spine ramrod-straight, breathing labored.

"Anevka," he said more softly, his eyes going to the cables emerging from her perifrontal hemisphere. 

Anevka was quite proud of that work. She hadn't even needed a minion, because with a clever array of mirrors and some specialized tools, she discovered she could work on her own head as she was awake for it.

"I do appreciate the concern, brother, but I assure you, this is quite delicate work I am doing, and I cannot have you simply trampling in here at this critical stage."

"What are you doing to yourself?" Tarvek asked slowly.

"A few improvements," Anevka replied with a smile. "I'm sure you did your best, but it appears that there were a few finer points of the human experience that slipped past you!"

He looked at her with undisguised wariness. Ah, so he had placed the emotional blocks on purpose. No wonder her moods never went lower than a chronic ennui.

"You're messing with your emotional centers," he said, as if she did not already know what she was doing.

"Obviously. That is where the defect lies."

"There's... there's no defect!" he said, a tinge of desperation to his voice. He took a step closer, but stopped when she held her hand up.

"Nice try, Tarvek, but really, did you think I wouldn't notice your sabotage?"

"It wasn't sabotage!" Tarvek insisted, now growing annoyed. "I wanted you to be happy!"

"Well, I want to be sad!" she screamed back, her voice cracking on the last word.

Inconveniently, it seemed she managed to remove the last block just in time to embarrass herself with an emotional display. How mortifying. How awful. 

Oh, how awful. She made a sound like a sob, though she did not have the ability to cry. No lungs, no tears. Only the pain, and she needed to get it out somehow.

"I never got to cry," she said, her voice high and reedy despite herself. "I never got to cry for anyone. I never got to cry for mother--" And what a piece of hypocrisy that was, for Anevka to cry for that woman, "I never got to cry for myself. I never got to!"

All she had ever had were the smiles. That was the only shield they'd ever given her. They'd taught her to defend herself, to kill, to evade assassination. They'd taught her how to protect herself with Smoke Knight tricks and with misdirection, but they had never told her what to do when her father told her, 'Sit in the chair.' When her own father flipped the switch and boiled her brain inside her own skull. Smiles had not saved her from that.

She looked at Tarvek, and tears were streaming down his face. She thought she would envy him for it, but all she felt now was the pain. The mourning that she had never gotten to do for herself.

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice choked.

She wanted to yell back, 'No, you're not', just so he'd know how it had felt when Anevka had had the words yelled at her, but the truth was that Anevka didn't know. She'd not felt those words at the time the way she would now.

"I know," she said instead. "But that's not... that's not enough. I need _this_. I need pain."

Hers, his. Anyone's. Shouldn't someone feel the pain of her death?

He walked closer, and he closed the distance, putting his arms around her. He was careful of the cables as he pulled her into a hug, and she hid her face in the crook of his shoulder as her body convulsed in dry sobs. He'd not hugged her since they'd both been so small, that the experience now felt foreign, and removed from anything they'd ever known of each other as adults.

Good, Anevka thought. This was something entirely new, and that was a good thing.


End file.
